wednesday, eighteen august: strength
I am definitely in the "what day is it" stage of summer, also known as the part where I've a little bit given up and am just riding it out to the end. It's certainly a huge irony in my life that I get this five-or-six-week summer break, the kind of unstructured vacation time that many people would desperately want, and I'm not any good at it. Temperamentally I prefer more structure--this was one of the big lessons of grad school, for, me, discovering the extent to which I absolutely do not thrive with a lack of structure and oversight. I like my job. I miss my office. (Are my plants still alive? Hilda in Maintenance usually waters all the office plants over the summer but I thought we were trying to give Maintenance some time off this summer.) (Oh god, the plants. I've filled a lot of the space in my office with plants, windowsills and bookshelf tops. It's a small office but I think I'm up to eight plants. In the spring of 2020, when school closed in early March I wasn't that worried about the plants, but in April when it became clear we weren't going back, I wrote to the head of school requesting permission to come to campus to rescue my plants. They gave me a time window to access my office and directions to not enter any other spaces on campus. I loaded the plants into totebags and ferried them all back to my car, filled the backseat with pothos and begonia and snake plants--I don't even like the snake plant, that one isn't mine, it was in the office when I moved in, but I felt responsible for it anyway. And then I had to find space for all those plants in our apartment, which was already too full now that no one ever left it.)
My brain is all to-do-lists right now; we never scheduled Declan's dental checkup, not to mention my own, and he and I both need haircuts before the first day of school. We're going today for our post-travel Covid tests. My annual physical this week went well but because I am Old they've referred me for a bunch of screening tests and I need to figure out the scheduling on those. There are a million house-and-moving tasks that we can't even really get started on until we have the closing date set, I need to figure out the logistics around dropoff and lunches for Zoo Camp next week, and jesus christ I probably need to buy even more masks for Declan because no matter how much I wash them we always need more, he gets marker stains on them or bites little holes in them like a gerbil. The guidebook says that today's tarot card, Strength, is about inner strength, mastery of emotions. Still working on that.